MEGHAN Markle looks like the most likely future wife yet for the Prince. But what have we learned about her this week?

On her birthday three months ago American actress Meghan Markle posted a poignant note on her lifestyle website The Tig: “I have to say that when I close my eyes and think of what I wish for, I come up with a blank. A big old happy blank. I am feeling so incredibly joyful right now, so grateful and content that all I could wish for is more of the same.”

The man who appears to have helped bring about this happy state of affairs is our very own Prince Harry.

By the time the woman who made her name on the long-running US legal drama series Suits shared her joy with the world, the two of them were believed to have been dating for some weeks. Latest reports indicate that the person who played Cupid was close friend and fashion designer Misha Nonoo.

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Nonoo who, until they split last month, was living with her husband Alexander Gilkes, who went to Eton with Harry and his brother William.

The fateful meeting between the American beauty and the Prince who is fifth in line to the throne is said to have taken place in June when Markle was in London to watch her friend Serena Williams play at Wimbledon before jetting off to Madrid for a holiday with Nonoo.

Since then the unlikely couple’s relationship is said to have developed at quite a pace. Markle is rumoured to have stayed with Harry at Kensington Palace and met not only the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge but also Prince Charles.

“They are the real deal,” says one friend.

Prince Harry's girlfriend Meghan Markle

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“He pursued her, besieging her with texts until she agreed to a date. He is very full-on but she was going through a tough time with her previous boyfriend and she was very flattered. He’s head over heels and she feels the same.”

I am feeling so incredibly joyful right now, so grateful and content

Meghan Markle

So just what do we know about Markle, who – at 35 – is three years older than her royal suitor? For a start she is a divorcee.

That did not play well when Edward VIII took up with Wallis Simpson 80 years ago but in an era when the heir to the throne is himself divorced – as is his wife – it is hardly an impediment.

More of a problem for a conservative lady like the Queen might be the fact that Markle’s day job occasionally calls on her to perform love scenes wearing not much more than a smile.

She is big on yoga and dotes on her two rescue dogs: a beagle called Guy and a German shepherd/labrador cross called Bogart.

She loves to cook and drink “copious amounts of rosé” with friends such as Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, American socialite Olivia Palermo and Markus Anderson, the global membership director of the Soho House group of private clubs.

But to gain a real insight into the character and personality of the woman, who is already being talked of as Windsor wife material, we need to delve into her past.

Markle was born in LA in 1981, the only daughter of Thomas, a lighting director, and his African American wife Doria. It is clear that Markle was preoccupied with her racial identity from a young age.

Like so many little girls she coveted a set of Barbie dolls but in the 1980s they only came in black or white versions.

Her father solved the problem one Christmas by creating a customised gift set of “a white Ken doll for the dad and a black Barbie for the mum” plus a child in each colour.

It was a gesture that clearly meant a lot to her because she has recalled the incident in a number of interviews.

Her parents divorced when she was six but Markle, who has described herself as a “studio rat”, spent time with her father on the set of the sitcom Married With Children, where he enjoyed a long stint, and she was clearly a precocious child.

At the age of 11 she took exception to a TV commercial for a washing-up liquid that used the slogan, “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans”.

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The Suits actress star in a raunchy scene in the show

Incensed by the inherent sexism she wrote a letter of protest to the manufacturer and the then first lady Hillary Clinton. Within a few months the word “women” had been replaced by “people”.

Her early promise was not lost on her school friends. One said this week: “Meghan was really charismatic and a very hard worker and you could tell she was going to do something special with her life.”

She attended Northwestern University, Illinois, where she started out taking theatre studies before deciding she didn’t want to be a “cliché” and so ended up completing a double major in theatre and international relations.

During her second year she applied for an internship at a US embassy and ended up working in Buenos Aires.

She is even said to have flirted with the idea of a career in politics. In the event, Markle’s acting career began unexpectedly when a friend introduced her had watched a student fi lm she had starred in, told her she would “make money” acting.

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Markle is rumoured to have stayed with Harry at Kensington Palace

However it has not all been plain sailing: “I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones,” she wrote of her early career in a column for Elle.

“Leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job.”

Fortunately Markle had learned “old-fashioned penmanship” at her private Catholic high school and she supplemented her income from acting with earnings from her work as a freelance calligrapher, once writing invitations to singer Robin Thicke’s wedding.

She won her first TV part in the daytime soap General Hospital and that was followed by roles in series such as sci-fi drama Fringe, 90210 and CSI:NY before she got her big break with Suits, which meant a move to the Canadian city of Toronto where it is filmed.

By now Markle was in a long-term relationship with film producer Trevor Engelson. They had been together for seven years by the time they got married in a barefoot ceremony on a Jamaican beach in front of 102 guests in September 2011. But it didn’t last and the couple were divorced within two years.

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Meghan Markle in new Reitmans clothing range

In 2014 she started a relationship with Cory Vitiello, head chef of The Harbord Room, one of Toronto’s buzziest restaurants until it was closed last month to allow him to concentrate on Flock, his rapidly expanding chain of chicken joints.

On the face of it a romance with the handsome Vitiello was a match made in heaven because Markle comes across as a bit of a food obsessive. On one occasion she jumped on a plane to London after getting a cancellation at Restaurant Story, the Michelin-starred eatery run by her “good friend” Tom Sellers.

When asked to name the five guests she would invite to her ultimate dinner party three of them were celebrity chefs: Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali and Jamie Oliver.

And her website carries interviews she has conducted personally with no fewer than 34 chefs, including Vitiello himself. But it was not to be.

The man from Brantford, Ontario, who had what Markle describes as “the small-town charm and moral compass of someone who doesn’t come from a big city” clearly couldn’t compete with a charismatic British prince.

When news of Meghan and Harry’s relationship first broke it was thought they had met in May when he was in Toronto to promote the 2017 Invictus Games for servicemen and women injured in combat.